What is an app store rating?
An app store rating is the average score members have given an app on the App Store or Google Play, shown publicly beside the listing, and it is the only quality measure in this category that prospective members can see before they join.
It is public, and it is about you
Every other number in this glossary is private. This one is on the storefront, next to your brand, visible to anybody deciding whether to join. It is also frequently the only thing a prospect reads about your technology.
In our monthly index of Australian gym and studio apps, roughly a quarter of gym apps are rated under three stars by their own members. A sub-three-star app store rating is a brand problem sitting in plain sight, usually unowned by anybody in the business.
What the reviews actually say
Read them rather than the average. In this category the complaints cluster tightly: the app crashes or will not load, the booking screen is slow or wrong, the login fails, and nothing has been updated in a long time. Programming and content complaints are comparatively rare.
That is useful, because it means most of the rating is earned on reliability rather than features. Fixing crashes and the booking path moves the number more than anything new will.
Ask at the right moment, and reply
Prompting for a review after a frustrating moment collects the rating you deserve at that moment. Prompting after a completed session, a personal best or a finished program collects a different one, and it is the same members either way.
Both stores allow operators to reply to reviews, most never do, and a visible reply changes how the whole listing reads to somebody scanning it.
Questions operators ask
Four that come up on almost every call about an app store rating.
Mostly reliability rather than features. Crashes, slow or incorrect booking screens, login failures and long gaps between updates account for the majority of one and two star reviews we see across the Australian market.
Fix the crashes and the booking path first, ship updates regularly so the listing does not look abandoned, ask for reviews after good moments rather than at random, and reply to the reviews you already have.
After something went well. A completed session, a personal best or a finished program. Never on launch, never after an error, and never more than occasionally, because repeated prompting is itself a common complaint.
It is visible to every prospect who looks, which makes it part of your public brand whether or not anybody in the business owns it. For a chain whose members compare the app to consumer fitness apps, a sub-three-star listing is doing real damage.
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Tell us where you are and what your members are doing. We will tell you what we would do about it.
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